My wife absolutely cannot stand my desire to listen to the radio at barely audible volume. She said it’s nails on a chalkboard. It forces her brain to process that which cannot be processed at this volume.
Holy shit. I feel that pain. See also: the upstairs neighbor's TV.
Yeah, I feel that!
yeah same here, that, people whispering, and someone attempting to talk to me when a loud noise is happening nearby drive me insane and make me want to throw chairs
i think its cool but also infuriating. because at super low volume i hear a completely different song as i try to understand whats playing
For me at least, context and consent are two big things that can make or break me.
That is a great way to explain the difference, saving that one for reference.
I have pretty bad misophonia. It's only really triggered by certain sounds (sand paper and chewing being the biggest offenders) but when it happens I literally go into fight or flight mode and freak the fuck out. I am a machinist by trade and needing to avoid sand paper at all costs really affects my life severely.
I'm probably neurotypical and I don't get how people like me don't understand misophonia
Almost everyone experiences misophonia. It's rare to not be upset by the sound of fingernails on blackboards and similar sounds; what's so odd about some people having a wider range of problem sounds?
misophonia is worse
nails on a blackboard are not a trigger for me, it's an awful screeching sound and it makes my skin crawl but it is not a misophonia trigger
when my misphonia triggers, as the person above said - my entire body goes into fight, flight, or freeze, in that order too. My first instinct is to want to stop the source of the sound with force, but it's rather socially unacceptable to punch people who are just eating and talking at the same time, so flight kicks in, but then it's rude to get up and leave mid-christmas dinner, so i just freeze, and want to scream and cry because at that point my mind cannot focus on anything else but that one sound. It's the loudest thing in my head constantly winding up my body to do something anything to stop it or just not have to hear it anymore.
i've settled on at least telling my family to not make my trigger sounds around me, oftentimes i've been told i'm "rude" for doing that too :| it's seemingly incredibly difficult for them to understand that i'd like to feel nice at family gatherings too, and one thing they'd have to "sacrifice" to make that happen is talking with their mouths full of food
if a stranger makes any trigger sounds i just leave, i rarely care enough to put myself through the whole "you can't tell me what to do also you're being rude and i don't care" thing so I suffer through it and dip at the soonest opportunity
It's the difference between 'this annoys me' and 'this drives me into an uncontrollable emotional response'
My first major ASD hint was when I found out overwhelming smells don't make most people angry
Interesting about sand paper is one of your triggers. I have misophonia too, some sounds more severe than others. I have a lot of sensory triggers but sand paper is not one of them. Hearing someone chew on food makes me want to instantly punch a wall or throw a chair through a window. I go into fight mode instantly. Also that squeaking noise that happens when you crush a cotton ball in your fingers and rub it against itself… ugh just thinking about it…
When the symptoms developed in my early teens there wasn’t even a word for the condition and it wasn’t u til the early-mid aughts that I found out what the name was and had an idea of what I was experiencing. Definitely made me feel less alone that at least one of my conditions had some info. It was very lonely before that since my sensory issues are very much present with me at every moment and they take an extraordinary amount of willpower and determination to keep them in check and I’ve only learned those coping mechanisms in the last few years when I dove deep into therapy and trying to understand my condition.
It helps now that I can point to documentation about my sensory issues and not feel like I am sounding like a crazy person. My friends and family know, I talk about it all openly now and can explain to people how it affects me. It is amazing the level of understanding and compassion people now have around stuff like this. That understanding of course isn’t universal and there is so much further society has to go in the mental health realm but for someone in their 40s to finally get some answers over the last 10-15 years about these things that affect how I experience the world. I have only been seeking therapy for it over the past 5 years but I can honestly say I am the happiest o have ever been, I am no longer this gloomy person trying to keep my emotions in check all the time to control my conditions but I live openly with them now, redirecting and using the condition to help me. Learning how to control my mind better and thinking patterns. It feels like aikido but for thoughts and emotions.
There is so much more to learn about our senses and we have made such amazing headway during my lifetime that I am hopeful for the future.
Take care and good luck!
Any luck using sound muffling headphones or something similar? I'm not sure if they would be safe to use on the job. That's really tough!
I have a pair of Loop earplugs my brother's wife bought me for Christmas a couple years ago. I was skeptical but they help a ton with my sound sensitivity. I used to not be able to be around kids for too long without getting really stressed out by all the yelling and crying and they pretty much eliminated that.
You shove food in your mouth all the time. This may have green hair on it but it shouldn't be a problem. Now stop struggling while I tape that funnel to your mouth.
I'm not diagnosed adhd/add/autism spectrum, but I do have a LOT of the signs. I am diagnosed panic disorder/anxiety/depression. Unexpected sounds are a major trigger for my panic attacks.
A dropped pan, child screaming, or some other unexpected sound can trigger a panic attack in seconds. However, I also love the gun range, loud concerts, loud movies. It's me telling my brain to expect something unusual that makes those things tolerable. I still have moments where I have to drive with no radio, step out of a movie, or head to the restroom at a concert to calm down. It's so weird to me, and my wife sometimes doesn't understand.
I believe Dr. Russell Barkley, a leading ADHD researcher over the last 4-5 decades who is now mostly retired, has a statistic that if you have undiagnosed ADHD and are over the age of 30 then you have an almost 100% chance of developing an anxiety disorder as a comorbidity to your ADHD.
I was diagnosed at a young age with depression and battled that my entire life, prescribed depression meds off and on for 30 years until I decided to explore my ADHD/Autism/synesthesia suspicions and a few other sensory things. When I was diagnosed with ADHD and went on meds for that it completely eliminated my need for depression meds. Turns out the issue wasn’t a chemical imbalance in my brain causing depression but it was my internal negative self messaging that was causing me to be depressed. Who knew that struggling with AdHD and autism my whole life that caused me to try really hard to the point I would burn myself out and fail, a symptom of ADHD, was causing a negative self image of me being a failure. The ADHD meds helped me overcome my executive dysfunction issues and the therapy helped me unwind that negative self image I had, which took care of the depression.
I can honestly say I am now living my best life and I am the most happy/joyous/content I have ever been. It took a lot of work over the last 5 years and YMMV as it is not an easy road to address these issues later in life but the journey is worth it. You owe it to your current and future self to explore ADHD/Autism suspicions.
I realized I could never be happy without first finding out who I am and how my brain works because I couldn’t play this game of life without knowing my strengths, weaknesses or pitfalls to avoid until I learned who I was and how I worked. Once I learned that info I started building my life routines around those symptoms in a healthy and structured way and I feel more real as a person. Not a shell trying to pretend to be normal. Once I was able to unmask and be openly honest with the people and world around me so much of the anxiety, doubt and pain just evaporated. I was using way too many brain processing cycles masking that it was draining the life out of me.
Explore who you are and you may find peace and balance.
Good luck, I’m rooting for you!
Thank you for this. You are the 2nd person I've heard from that have said the same thing about undiagnosed ADHD/ADD. I didn't get panic attacks until post covid, and I'm also over 30. I have seriously considered checking out the ADHD path when I get insurance again. I have come off my anti-anxiety meds in preparation for that path and hope it's the right move.
@db0 True for me. Heck, it's practically painful to listen to The Offspring when *not* played at a loud volume. 🤘
Yeah, blast it loud enough to drown out any other noises, tinnitus, thoughts, just music and stimming pls
Music follows predictable rythms.
Oooooh i relate so bad. Im not neurodivergent in any way but i am really sensory. It is a strange thing. My hearing and vision are extreme and my taste and touch are pretty good. My nose on the other hand is horrible, im always the last to notice smells. Its kinda sad that nobody talks about these seperate from autism. When my mom(a doctor) started researching about why i seemed to be scared of loud noises and why i always cried in the car when someone played loud music she only found german literature which was a big limitation because she only spoke fluent english and hungarian but youd guess the english would be usefull here but turns out most countries discouraged research into it(btw i still dont know the english name of it, in hungarian its túlhallás literally meaning over-hearing). In the end she found an expert in the capital who did research and helped other people with this condition in his FREETIME because everybody ignores it. Turns out my hearing is on par with a dogs in some frequencies and in every frequency he measured it was in like top 1% at least. On some frequencies my hearing capped out the specialised machine 💀. I dont know the measurments but my hearing is someting like 50x better than what most hearing testers measure and more than 100x better than whats still considered healthy. He said i was the most extreme case he ever saw but its still sad that 20-30x hearing is still kinda common especially among kids and people just say man-up to them when they experience extreme pain. In reality my hearing is worse than most people because ususally you dont have conversations in noise sealed rooms but in busy placed where the sounds of cars, other people, etc literally blow out anything that i actually want to hear. Noise-cancelling headphones are a blessing, i use mine on the lowest volume and even set the volume to low on spotify and thats comfortable. Most people cant even make out that im listening to music when they try my headphones.
TLDR: i have a hearing condition that makes me hear extremely well and almost all medical literature ignores the existence of it and loud noises cause me physical pain thats worse than getting kicked in the balls
Daym. With there must be a career somewhere in out there that you'd be godlike at using such superhuman hearing. Something like detecting minute faults in (otherwise silent) devices or smt.
That person might be able to hear termites through walls unironically. There's devises we use but they're not 100 percent cause they're so sensitive they pick up planes far away that most people can't hear. This person could probably differentiate between a far plane and termites scuttling around. They're very quiet, AFAIK no normal human can hear them.
Is this a reference to Andrew Ditch?
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